Patrick Comiskey

You make reasonable assumptions about what you're going to drink depending on where you are. You don't go to Manhattan Beach to drink scotch, any more than you would Ensenada; you expect something more beachy there, in a tropical, caipirinha-colada vein perhaps. In Silver Lake you may be able to......

For the past three years, a small group of California chardonnay and pinot noir producers has gathered for a conference and tasting called In Pursuit of Balance. In past years it's been staged in San Francisco and New York; in 2013, for the first time, they brought their wines and......

At the New Zealand Consulate in Brentwood last week there was a wine tasting of that country's pinot noir. There were just 18 wines in the seminar, curated by British Master of Wine Tim Atkin; and yet this amounted to a quietly nuanced performance, demonstrating the strides that country has......

There are drinks that, as the saying goes, hit the spot, and then there are those like the toddy, the warm concoction for winter nights with a capacity for comfort-making that seems almost erogenous in its acuity at landing in the spots needed to be hit. A well-made, well-seasoned, well-heated......

Caitlin Stansbury is a force. L.A.'s busiest wine consultant has become its most recent wine author with the debut of Wineocology, a wine-appreciation manual steeped in exclamatory energy. The book is a culmination of years of experience on the dining floors of myriad local restaurants, where Stansbury has been consulted......

Cocktail impresario Sam Ross was in town last week to train the staff of Hinoki & the Bird in Century City, which, as this goes to press, is in soft-open mode. I went to the unfinished restaurant last week to sample some of the new creations, but on the day......

Market research from the Wine Market Council, in its annual analysis of the American drinks market, provides more irrefutable evidence that the United States is becoming a wine culture. The country's drinking habits continue to move toward wine above beer and spirits, making it as the fastest-growing class of inebriates......

Oregon's Willamette Valley has been luring California winemakers for the better part of two decades -- Andrew Rich, Tony Soter, Robert Brittan, and Cheryl Francis all come to mind as not so recent transplants -- but Maggie Harrison, of Antica Terra, represents a kind of special case. In 2005 Harrison......

The arrival of Beirbeisl in Beverly Hills as a pristine example of Austrian cuisine -- check out Besha Rodell's review, out today -- comes as Austrian wines enter into a kind of renaissance in California, a blossoming of popularity, a flurry of import activity, and the thrilling entry of red......

Like a bare tree in winter, some winter drinks are meant to be austere: dry, direct, bracing, with the sort of thrust that allows its effects to make a beeline to the belly. Certainly that's true with your basic shot, whether tequila or scotch or bourbon, but not everyone is......